Automated Blue Science Pack Factory

[WarpZone]

Got here from google image search. I am so confused by this:

How do you get the petroleum into the plastic factory? It looks like you have a north-facing Underground Pipe that goes underneath the other water pipe... how does that even work? I can't figure out how to build this.

[Xeanoa]

Yes, the underground pipe faces north. The exit is somewhere outside of the screenshot.

[WarpZone]

Oh, whoops. I see my problem. For some reason I thought the pipe immediately north of that one was also a Pipe-to-Ground. I couldn't figure out how to stop them from connecting to each other. Now I realize it just uses regular pipes. Derp.

[mrvn]

Lets just pretend we want to research everything. Lets call that the victory goal.
*Edit* My friend here pointed out below that all research is not 30 seconds. I failed to mention that for the sake of simpler math(laziness?) I made everything 30 seconds. This would effect actual times but not the overall result since LE4 will reduce all times by half.

Costs...LE itself will add 14,875 copper and 20,000 iron to max. A very expensive price to pay for speed.
In total the LE full research tree will be
676,835 Copper
888,040 Iron Plate

In Total the non LE research will be
661,960 Copper
868,040 Iron

A difference of, this can't be right, ~2.2%. That seems...ABSOLUTELY CORRECT

To decide weather LE is worth it or not you have to consider the cost of not using LE. So to compare things we want to research at the same speed, which is determined by the production speed. So lets leave that out, use the same production setup for both cases.

If you are going slow then just building more labs will certainly be cheaper than LE. But if you want to go really fast then you need a ton of labs. But the saving from LE is always the same resource wise. The question then is: How many labs can you build for the difference in copper/iron that LE?

Another question: Did you count the cases where you need 100x 1 green and 2 red science packs for something? What is the total time for doing all research with just one lab and how many science packs does it need?